The Foolish Prince
by Greenway
Summary: Draco Malfoy has been chosen, tasked with a dangerous and perhaps impossible assignment. Should he fail he stands to lose everything he holds dear. Should he succeed, he stands to lose so much more. AU.


Prologue

Sins of the Father

The storm clouds had lingered over Malfoy Manor for almost a week now. A long, long week. A week unlike any other in the ancient and storied history of the Malfoy family. The Patriarch, Lucius Malfoy, had taken up permanent residence in Azkaban prison, his own personal storm clouds creating a daily feast for a horde of hungry Dementors. His wife, Narcissa, was bound not by stonewalls or soul-sucking creatures but, rather, an altogether more frightening and complex manner of imprisonment.

It was at that very moment, in fact, that she felt shadows and not walls closing in around her. Neither wand light nor candlelight could illuminate the long, deep dark of Malfoy Manor. It was in this very place where she had given her only son life, where she had first heard his desperate cries echo through the corridors, that she was now trapped like a rodent, lost and confused, hungering for her freedom.

Sixteen years later and those cries rang louder than ever. Mother and son were separated by a heavy oak door thick with black lacquer, that and barely a stone's throw, but as she heard him articulate his anguish, heard him scream like he had poison in his veins, she could scarcely recognise her Draco or herself. The trembling never stopped, nor did the tears. Moment by moment her heart was picked apart inside her chest, and the tiny pieces were ripped away, one at a time, until there was no wound to be seen, no scar to commemorate the occasion, instead merely a memory of the wretched thing and the vivid and excruciating details of its demise.

" _Coward_ ," said her sister, Bellatrix Lestrange, from the other side of the door.

Bellatrix was a witch of prodigious talent, and unsound mind, for whom words were but the finest thread of the most intricate tapestry. The kind of tapestry one might roll up until long and thin and use to hang their enemies. And of those there were no shortage, not when her insanity was a playground drenched in familiar blood.

Draco for his part stayed momentarily silent, trembling every bit as uncontrollably as his mother. Though, certainly, his concerns were more than mere memories. His handsome face, pale and pointed like his father's, was swollen almost beyond recognition, spotted purple and blue from his hairline to his throat. The grey of his eyes was dulled by defeat, his white-blond hair matted with dried blood, steaks of dark red colouring his roots. Until now pain had existed only at the tips of his fingers, extended outwards, bestowed upon everything he touched.

How quickly things had changed.

"Look at you, Draco," Bellatrix snarled, her dark eyes wild as she waved her wand about threateningly. "It pains me to see what you've become. A _waste_. Every gift you could ask for was placed at your feet. Looks. Wealth. _Blood_. You should be the best. I can feel it even now, the power residing within you. And what do you do instead?"

Her laughter came in waves. The kind of laughter that knew only malice. It was laughter designed to wound, and at this his dear old auntie was a most talented practitioner. She wandered over in that strange, unsettling way of hers, half-drunk, half-mad, half-unquantifiable and immeasurable since there would only ever be one Bellatrix Lestrange set loose upon the world. When she stopped and leered over him she appeared, despite her thin, frail and short stature, a hundred feet tall.

"You _wilt_ , Draco," she barked, her teeth pressed together now, little blackened nubs that spoke volumes as to the strain of her years in Azkaban. "You wilt in the shadow of a mediocre wizard and his Mudblood pet. Smarter than you is she, Draco?"

"No," he choked out, only to be met with a pain beneath his skin like a thousand oscillating razor blades being driven towards his spine. He screamed, and he cried, but the Cruciatus curse knew no mercy. It felt like hours before it stopped but was in truth merely a matter of seconds. Draco looked up over his shoulder, tasting bile on the back of his tongue, his dull, blood-shot eyes imploring her to stop. The very definition of a losing battle.

"This is for your own good, my darling nephew," she said, her head tilted to one side, a deranged smile pulling at her dry and pale lips. "All of this. Cissy may not like it. _You_ may not like it. But I'm doing all of this for you, Draco. So you can be all that you can be. So that you can _succeed._ So that you can better serve your Dark Lord." She paused, hesitating in the most calculating way, displaying her handsome cheekbones as she smiled again, a painful reminder of her former beauty. "You do want to serve him, don't you?"

Draco sucked in a deep, shuddering breath of air. With the Cruciatus curse still echoing through his nervous system, every breath felt like it might be his last.

" _Yes_."

"That's a good boy," she replied in some close approximation of cheerfulness. She fell to her knees then, her short, crooked fingers brushing over his soft hair, the state of which made her blackened, chipped fingernails look quite at home there. With her other hand she reached between them, a dreamy and half-deranged smile lighting up her face as she stroked the inside of his forearm through his shirt. "You're his now. And you should be honoured. Without him we are nothing."

Her skin was like ice, cold and clammy, he could feel it through the thin fabric of his shirt; and yet, strangely, the way she stroked his hair proved painfully reminiscent of his mother's touch. Lacking her warmth, of course, lacking any desirable aspect whatsoever, in fact, but if there was one thought he needed to cling to, to lean on when pillars of strength otherwise seemed so few and far between, it was that their bloodline was the strongest force imaginable. A thousand years of purity stood behind them like noble statues, tall and marble made, watching over a legacy that could not and would not falter now. The Malfoy name, and those that carried it, meant everything. It was all that mattered now.

"You won't fail him will you, Draco?" she asked, her fingers curling around the back of his neck, threading through his hair, her very touch insistent.

"No," came his whispered response, his words like ashes on his tongue, dry and dangerous. "Never."


End file.
